News flash: Eating two pounds of Awful Tasting Vegetable X every day may reduce your risk of heart disease by up to 40 percent. Isn’t that exciting? You’re changing your family’s dietary regimen even as you read, right?
Probably not. And for the same reasons I am not.
The great Henry Ford once said, “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said a faster horse.” That concept is difficult for us to understand in a world that has never not known automobiles. But we read about a world (there may even be a few souls left who remember one) in which the quality of your horse or horses determined the quality of your journey. Knowing a better way now, it seems silly to yearn for yesteryear.
Every Southern household has its own recipe for peach cobbler. They differ widely. Personally, I like a lot of peaches, a nice goopy consistency with the filling, and a crispy, sugary crust. Others may prefer a more biscuit-like pastry, or a deeper pastry level than I like. That’s fine. Some prefer to make theirs in a casserole dish in the oven, some like the Crock Pot, some go old school and use a cast-iron Dutch oven over an open fire. Everyone’s entitled to their own opinion. But we all absolutely must agree on two bits of business: it must feature peaches, and it must be a cobbler. It’s right there in the name, after all. Peach. Cobbler.
One of my Facebook “friends” (actually a complete stranger to me — social media makes for odd relationships) posted the following last week: “Don’t you dare tell me who I can call my brothers and sisters in Christ! That is way above your pay grade!”
I was tempted to respond, “Is it above yours?”
I will be honest with you — I don’t get Halloween. I mean no disrespect to those who consider it their favorite holiday, and I know there are some who do. I don’t think every child in a mask is a Satanist. In the devil’s world there are plenty of legitimate bogeymen to chase; I see no need to imagine any extra ones.
I could go on and on indefinitely regarding my brother in Christ and fellow Bible student Jesse Winn — particularly regarding some of the specific issues he raised recently regarding the things he has come to “believe” about faith in Jesus. If anyone would like to discuss a particular point of interest with which I have not fully dealt, I will be more than happy to do so in a different forum. I believe I have made my general points I have made about differences of doctrine within the body of Christ and how to deal with them. I will limit my specific points regarding such differences to one specific: baptism.
I was called on the carpet recently for using the term “receiving Jesus” — a term frequently used by those in the denominations to refer to finding grace, particularly in the absence of baptism or any other concrete act of obedience. I then caught myself saying it twice in the very next sermon I preached, so I suppose the observation is valid.
